h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's where Bath is: mine and my wife's favourite city. When they eventually fix the lottery machine (so that it delivers the correct numbers ), we're going to have a flat in the centre of Bath, and a house out in the Dorset countryside. I can hardly wait!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Finally got to go to this group this evening, and I have to say that I found it both interesting and useful. The comments were constructive and helpful, and the standard of poems was not intimidating.

Bizzarely one of the people there I knew when I was a teenager and she was directing plays I ASMed for. However, I saw no point in saying so.

All in all, I was quite pleased with it.

And satisfyingly enough, the woman who had been so extremely odd on the phone, stressing the 'hard crits' and that 'we are published poets' produced a piece of un-thought-through cr@p. I shouldn't gloat, but I do.

I am looking forward to the next one.

B

I'm glad that you enjoyed it! it sounds useful, considering the standard of some bad poets I can see why they are protective!

Hi Ben,

Good to see that you got on well amongst the self-proclaimed "seeerious poets."

BTW for the purposes of yet another Sandymount Strand haiku, would you reckon "whale" has one or two syllables in it, i.e., is its official stress value one long syllable as in "whail", or two elided syllables as in "whay-el." The latter is closer to my pronounciation, but then I'm both Irish and a Dubliner ( for all the Anglo-accent!)

What hangs on this earth-shattering issue is whether I can exclude the word "like" in the last line of the following:

Hazey, hot, humid -
Through the mist Howth Head breaches
like a hump-backed whale.


And here's another light-hearted haiku from the previous day's walk:

Dried on hot white sand -
the dead forks of someone's meal:
sun-bleached plastic bones.

( If "meal" can be reckoned di-syllabic, I'd get rid of the "the" at the beginning of that line too. Just this moment transposed bones and forks. I think it's better this way. )